Former Charlotte mayor and current U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is being sued by the trustee of his former employer for $421,000. The suit accuses Foxx of not actually working for locally based busmaker DesignLine during his tenure there as deputy general counsel.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in Charlotte, states that Foxx “purportedly served” as deputy general counsel while DesignLine never had “an in-house General Counsel.” Further, the suit says the bus company hired two outside firms to help with “obtaining financing, board meetings, collection issues, contract negotiations, and general legal counsel.”

Those firms were paid “millions of dollars” even while Foxx, as deputy general counsel, “spent little to no time at (DesignLine’s) facilities during the relevant time period.”

According to the suit, there are no records of the outside firms and Foxx discussing any matters related to DesignLine or working together in any way.

“This is a routine claim — one of many dozens brought by this trustee,” Mark MacDougall, Foxx’s lawyer at Washington firm Akin Gump, told me Tuesday. “It’s a routine claim. ... We’re confident this will be resolved in Secretary Foxx’s favor.”

Foxx was elected mayor in November 2009. In December, he took office, the same month he left his job at Hunton & Williams to become deputy general counsel at DesignLine. He remained in that role through his re-election in 2011 and left in the summer of 2013, when he moved to Washington to become federal transportation secretary.